Remote Install???

[Pothedd]

My girlfriend's MBP is a 2008 model, mine's a 2009 unibody.
We need to reformat her hard drive. It's been a long time and the damn thing doesn't work right anymore.
We can't find her OS X disc anywhere. I put mine in her computer. It tries to read it (?) and spits it out.
I'm trying to remote install os x with my disc drive. I've enabled cd/dvd sharing and ran the remote install wizard, but no matter what her computer doesn't find any other drives to boot from.
Even when I go to System Preferences>>Startup Disk>>Network Startup
it just says "Boop" when I click restart.
How am I supposed to fix her computer? I've been at it for hours and I'd much rather be playing video games...

I forgot to say that there's no airport menu when i hold down option on at startup. Just displays the HD...

 

[flat4]

My girlfriend's MBP is a 2008 model, mine's a 2009 unibody.
We need to reformat her hard drive. It's been a long time and the damn thing doesn't work right anymore.
We can't find her OS X disc anywhere. I put mine in her computer. It tries to read it (?) and spits it out.
I'm trying to remote install os x with my disc drive. I've enabled cd/dvd sharing and ran the remote install wizard, but no matter what her computer doesn't find any other drives to boot from.
Even when I go to System Preferences>>Startup Disk>>Network Startup
it just says "Boop" when I click restart.
How am I supposed to fix her computer? I've been at it for hours and I'd much rather be playing video games...

I forgot to say that there's no airport menu when i hold down option on at startup. Just displays the HD...

Try target disk mode.

 

[Pothedd]

Been there, done that.
As stated before I have a unibody MBP meaning there is no firewire port.
I tried it with an ethernet cable between the two laptops but it still doesn't work.
Any better ideas?

 

[patrixl]

Get a Snow Leopard retail disk (30$?) it should support her Mac out of the box. I doubt the restore disk from your MBP will allow installation on her model.


If her DVD drive doesn't work, find a USB hard drive and repartition it with a GUID table, then use Disk Utility to "restore" the DVD of OS X 10.6 to the new partition, this'll make the hard drive bootable with the OS X install. Heck it's how I do it, got my restore hard drive with a OS X partition and Time Machine partition, way faster than using a DVD 😉

 

[shadygrove]

Get a Snow Leopard retail disk (30$?) it should support her Mac out of the box. I doubt the restore disk from your MBP will allow installation on her model.


If her DVD drive doesn't work, find a USB hard drive and repartition it with a GUID table, then use Disk Utility to "restore" the DVD of OS X 10.6 to the new partition, this'll make the hard drive bootable with the OS X install. Heck it's how I do it, got my restore hard drive with a OS X partition and Time Machine partition, way faster than using a DVD 😉

I always keep a bootable partition for this very reason. I however have always been lucky and had a Mac with firewire. I have always wondered how to do it without.